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A few weeks ago, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia released a declassified version of a judge’s ruling in the case of Al Rabiah, a Kuwaiti citizen who has been held at Guantanamo for seven years. The judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, found that the government could not credibly support its allegation that Al Rabiah was part of the Taliban or al-Qaida, and that the evidence against him wasn’t sufficient to justify his continued detention. She ordered the government to release Al Rabiah “forthwith.”

But the judge’s opinion is more than a legal document; it’s also a window into the interrogation process at Guantanamo and the risk that “enhanced interrogation techniques” will produce false information. Excerpts from the opinion are below; you can also read the whole document.

Al Rabiah often used his vacations to perform humanitarian work in impoverished or war-torn countries, the judge writes, and it was to perform the same kind of work that he traveled to Afghanistan in October 2001—an explanation that Kollar-Kotelly writes is supported by the evidence. After he tried to leave the country via Iran, whose border guards denied him entry, Al Rabiah tried instead to cross the Pakistani border, but he was captured by villagers and turned over to the Americans, who later transferred him to Guantanamo.

The government’s evidence against Al Rabiah was “surprisingly bare.”

The government’s case against Al Rabiah initially rested on two main pillars: allegations made against him by fellow detainees and his own confessions. But in the judge’s opinion, neither held any weight.

The judge’s ruling cites four detainees who made allegations against Al Rabiah. The names of his accusers are redacted, as are the specifics of their allegations, but Kollar-Kotelly explains her reasons for rejecting them. The first accuser made statements that were incorrect; the second made statements that changed over time, and which the judge called “demonstrably false”; the third seems to have made statements about someone who was not Al Rabiah; and the fourth made his allegations only after one week of sleep deprivation, exceeding the military’s own guideline prohibiting sleep deprivation for more than four days, “and he did not repeat this allegation either before or after.”

Al Rabiah’s confessions were obtained only after his interrogators began using “aggressive interrogation tactics,” at least one of which was apparently used without proper authorization.

Kollar-Kotelly found that Al Rabiah initially denied any involvement with al-Qaida, even after he was told that eyewitnesses had made allegations to the contrary. Al Rabiah’s confessions began only after his interrogators “began using more aggressive interrogation tactics.”

Kollar-Kotelly writes that Al Rabiah told the court that he made his confessions “to reduce the abuse meted out by his interrogators ‘to obtain confessions that suited what [they] thought they knew or what they wanted [him] to say.’” According to the judge, Al Rabiah “maintained his confessions over time because ‘the interrogators would continue to abuse [him] anytime [he] attempted to repudiate any of these false allegations.’” The judge found that Al Rabiah’s interrogators supported his belief that if he did not confess, “his life would become increasingly miserable.”

Al Rabiah’s confessions frustrated his interrogators, leading them to use tactics that violated both the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions.

Kollar-Kotelly writes that Al Rabiah’s interrogators repeatedly concluded that his confessions were not believable, and she chides the government for using those confessions as the basis for justifying his continued detention at Guantanamo.

“Far from providing the Court with credible and reliable evidence as the basis for Al Rabiah’s continuous detention,” she writes, “the Government asks the Court to simply accept the same confessions that the Government’s own interrogators did not credit.”

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